Red Hat watched its stock tumble 6.4% on Thursday as Wall Street digested the open-source software firm's latest results and details on the drag its recent JBoss acquisition will have on its profit this year.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-10-08
> We got along in the computer industry without software patents
> for forty years - the forty years in which most of the innovation
> in software was done.
False conclusion. You cannot prove a cause effect relationship here. In fact, this is a common pattern in any new industry. There is an explosion of innovation, followed by a period where not much really changes. Simply because the idea well runs dry. Or because the ideas we have are so incredibly complex that implementing them is beyond our current knowledge of math and computer science. Or lack of understanding in other areas. Example, we fall way short at implementing a true human AI because we don't even understand what it is that makes us human.
I would also argue that a lot of the reason R&D at commercial software companies has slowed down is because of budget shortfalls. And sometimes those budget shortfalls are caused by the fact that their flagship products have been comoditized by open source. Commercial UNIX competes with Linux, Web app servers complete with tons of free versions, databases compete with MySQL and Postgres, etc.
Edited 2006-07-01 19:12
Member since:2006-02-15
> We got along in the computer industry without
>software patents for forty years - the forty years
> in which most of the innovation in software was done.
False conclusion. You cannot prove a cause effect relationship here.
It's not a conclusion, it's a statement of fact. Despite dire claims to the contrary, the industry did without software patents for all that time.
More money was spent on R&D when there was no patent protection for software than is being spent now that there is.
And sometimes those budget shortfalls are caused by the fact that their flagship products have been comoditized by open source. Commercial UNIX competes with Linux,
We stopped spending on R&D in commercial Unix systems long before Linux was stable enough to be competitive. Unix as an OS was already dying, and the major players were aware of why, before Linus even announced that he was going to write an OS.
But even now there's no evidence to support the claim that software patents are valuable. The major innovator in internet commerce is the porn industry, and they neither hold nor enforce software patents.
As far as I'm aware, Adobe has never used a patent to defend its market position for Photoshop and it still dominates that market.
There are far more examples of software market domination not relying on patents than there are of cases where enforcing a patent has provided a benefit.
Member since:
2006-02-15
Except how do you adapt to a system where you cannot protect your R&D investment? I will tell you how. You simply kill your R&D budget. And you stop R&D.
We got along in the computer industry without software patents for forty years - the forty years in which most of the innovation in software was done.
The trend in R&D spending, by the way, is the other direction. Most companies spend far less now on software R&D than they did fifteen years ago, and the numbers have been declining steadily since the late '80s.